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Skating champion Joannie Rochette wants Canadians to know a lot more about heart disease than she did when her mother died suddenly during the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver.

“I didn’t know that it was the number-one killer for women in Canada. I always thought it was an old man’s disease. My grandfather had a heart attack when he was 50 and to me it was a disease that mostly affected men. I didn’t know that it actually affects women even more.”

Speaking in a telephone interview from Montreal at the beginning of Heart Month on Wednesday, Rochette said her family should have seen the signs, but didn’t.

“I look back and my Mom had most of [the risk factors]. She was stressed out, she was smoking, she wasn’t eating right, she was not exercising, she was not taking her blood pressure at home.

“She was someone who would get easily nervous when I skate, so especially with her going to Vancouver and to the Olympics — a big event — she was very stressed out.”

Her family later found a list of symptoms Therese Rochette, 55, had written down, but not told them about: numbness in her lips and legs, pain in her left shoulder.

“It was quite surprising that she wasn’t aware of it and her doctor wasn’t aware of her being at risk of heart attack.”

Joannie Rochette won a bronze medal in ladies figure skating four days after her mother’s death at St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver. Therese had flown in from Quebec just hours before her heart attack. Her husband Normand had to find his daughter at the athletes’ village to deliver the bad news.

Rochette’s poise and determination to perform under such emotional strain was an inspirational high point of the Winter Games.

Now, at 26, she’s continuing a professional skating career — she’ll be back in Vancouver with Stars on Ice in May — and has also made a fitness DVD she hopes will help people get active. It’s available in French at stores throughout Quebec and Rochette’s own website. She hopes an English version will also be released. It includes specific exercises for skaters, but also a general home workout that anyone can do.

“When I was doing it, I thought a lot about my Mom for sure.”

Experts say that 80 per cent of heart disease is preventable by changing the way we live.

“I fought with her so hard not to smoke,” said Rochette. “And cigarettes. Who smokes nowadays? It’s not cool any more.”

Rochette says once people get started, one healthy habit can lead to another.

“It’s a cycle. The better you eat, the more active you want to be and the more active you are, your body will crave better food.”

Recent studies have shown that women may have different symptoms and outcomes with heart disease and researchers are looking the physical, psychological and social causes. Dr. Karin Humphries, a cardiac researcher at St. Paul’s Hospital specializing in women’s health, is analyzing data collected from 286 men and women under the age of 55 who had heart attacks in Vancouver and Victoria.

It’s not known exactly why women are more likely than men to die after a heart attack, said Humphries, but she’s examining the role of stress, anxiety and depression.

She said the most alarming finding so far is that women under 55 are still smoking. Forty per cent of the women in her study who had heart attacks were smokers, compared to an average rate of 14 per cent of all British Columbians. About 40 per cent of the men who had heart attacks were also smokers.

Research conducted mainly in the U.S. has found that up to 20 per cent of women with heart disease don’t have blockages in the large blood vessels of the heart, but rather constriction in smaller blood vessels. This can lead to pain in the arm, neck, chest, shoulder and jaw that is easily ignored. Men, in contrast, usually find out they have heart disease when they suffer a major attack which then gets prompt emergency attention in a hospital.

The Canadian Heart and Stroke Foundation has produced separate publications for women that highlight the differences at www.heartandstroke.com.

eellis@vancouversun.com

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Ignorance of heart disease deadly, Olympian Joannie Rochette says

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